Uhhh, nothing wrong with the AMD drivers in Windows, once AMD took over they got rid of the retarded.NET crap ATI was using and they have been working quite well since. i must have built close to triple didgits with AMD graphics, no problems. As for Windows I said you can get Win 8 for $40 and kill the Metro crap with Start8 but if it were me I'd spend a little more and get an OEM copy of Win 7 HP. Look around and they can be found between $80-$110, which considering it'll get updates until 2020 figures up to something like $15 a year, cheap as chips.
But again we frankly have never had it so good. I have probably over 100 games (don't feel like firing up Steam and counting) and I paid MAYBE $120 for the lot, all the games triple A, I paid less than $60 for a 256bit graphics card with over 900 stream processors, and I have a six core CPU that is fast and chews through everything I throw at it for which I paid a whole $105 with shipping. For PC gamers life is good.
Oh and for the one that pointed out THQ filed for bankruptcy? Might want to look at WHY they filed, it had nothing to do with PC games, it had to do with a moron in the company thinking spending 110 MILLION buying drawing tablets for the Wii was a good idea. They have a warehouse full of the things and can't get jack shit for them, they'll probably end up in a landfill somewhere. At least with PC games even if you make a turkey you can price it right and sell a lot of units, hell I bought Kane & Lynch II and Duke Nukem Forever when they hit $5 each just to see how bad they really are. BTW if anybody wonders? Duke is ruined by shitty weapons, not a single good gun in the whole damned game, Kane and Lynch is ruined by targeting, you can stand 3 feet from a guy and empty an Uzi and not hit him. Still worth $5 to laugh at though.
And I was happy to call out Jobs and Ballmer when they were acting like douchebags as well, especially when in a case like this the guy had a legit question (even if he was going the wrong way about fixing the problem) and it would have taken all of 30 seconds of being civil and explaining where the mistake was, or even "why it must be thus" but nope, instead of acting like a civil human being Torvalds turned it to 11 on the prick scale and he deserves to be called on it.
Not to mention everybody is completely missing the point, which is thus:...the guy is working on a complex subsystem with some serious driver issues, and he made a mistake, so what? in a complex project mistakes are gonna happen. He points out that the behavior of a good portion of the drivers is exactly like what he wrote therefor Pulse is gonna break with all those drivers as well which is why he thinks its a Pulse problem, because the kernel guys didn't write ALL those drivers, and the Pulse locking is gonna be puking when it gets to ANY of those drivers, which are many.
ALL LINUS HAD TO DO was spend a lousy 30 seconds saying "That may be, but here is how you should go about this" and done, that's it, problem solved, explanation given, error corrected. Does he do this? Nope he goes total apeshit and acts like a five year old that had his toy broken and just goes fucking nuts, when the other guy was actually acting like a rational human being. I'm sorry but dramaqueen douchebag of the week goes to Linus Torvalds for having a shitfit and big giant freakout when a simple 30 second explanation would have solved the whole thing with ZERO drama involved.
And people wonder why Linux devs have this rep of being little elitist jerks? this is the kind of behavior I'd expect from Drepper, NOT Torvalds.
Not to mention everybody seems to be ignoring what the guy was working on, he pointed out the drivers for the built in webcams on laptops is getting EXTREMELY complex and harder and harder to debug so they were trying to simply make it less of a mess. Did he fuck up? Yes but frankly there was no call for acting like a fucking dramaqueen douchebag, he's working on an extremely complex subsystem and made a mistake...no fucking shit, nobody working on a big complex project has ever made a fuckup?
And don't give me Torvald's "we never break userland" excuse, because as the guy pointed out Pulse is locking ALL the interfaces when it takes over and that naturally is gonna cause problems when you are talking about a 2 way device like a webcam with audio. If Torvalds didn't like his approach it would have taken him a whole 30 seconds to say "We just don't do things that way, here is what you should have done" but no, he completely flies off the handle and acts like a total prick.
Meh the list sucks, no Lumia, no Surface, no Windows 8. When you look at how much money has been shat right down the drain launching those 3 products its just insanity and its pretty much agreed by most that all 3 are megabombs. Just look at the figures of the Surface, as low as 500k after massive advertising and with Windows 8 the finger pointing has begun with OEMs coming out of the woodwork to say Win 8 is a poor product (the latest is Fujitsu, I'd provide a link but its on Yahoo Finance which creates insanely long URLs) and Ballmer proving he's not afraid to go full retard by basically giving the finger to the OEMs and deciding to make overpriced laptops, phones, and desktops so that if anybody doubted Ballmer's MSFT was just a poorly built Apple those doubts are over.
I don't see how this could be anything but the #1 spot, we are talking billions of dollars wasted on products nobody wanted, retailers can't move the things and in fact the sales from Oct-Dec were down 13% over the same period last year and so far every indication is its Win 8 that kept those shoppers away, we are talking HP buying Palm levels of uberfail here folks. I believe history will look back on this and say this was when we saw that marketing droids simply can't shovel overpriced shit down the throats of consumers and get them to buy based on nothing but flashy ads, because 4 billion in flashy ads couldn't keep Lumia and Win 8 from being another Vista. Talk about a trainwreck, this deserves the "WTF were they thinking?" award of 2012, no competition came even close to this level of fail.
Celeb or not I'd tell Torvalds to kiss my ass. I thought maybe that was at the end of a conversation...nope, the guy asks a simple question , one that would have taken Torvalds all of 30 seconds to explain like a rational human being, and instead he goes instantly to 11 on the douchebag scale.
I don't give a flying fuck WHO it is, be it Torvalds or Ballmer or Cook or Ellison if someone acts like a total fucking douchebag they should be called out for it and I'm calling him out, Linus Torvalds you sir are a douchebag. you could have solved the whole fucking thing in under 30 seconds by simply explaining why "it must be thus" but instead just acted like a giant flaming prick, it was completely uncalled for, the other guy was acting complete civil and politely, therefor the asshole of the week award should be given to Torvalds for flying so completely off the handle when there was zero point in it.
I'll add get rid of X-Server and give us something better than Pulse which seems to crap itself on update more times than I can count.
But personally I don't know why anybody would bitch about PC gaming now, if anything I'd say we are in the middle of another golden age. I have NEVER been able to get games as cheaply as I am now under Steam, I'm talking whole catalogs for less than the cost of a single console game (such as the THQ bundle for $30, great set) and the cards and chips? Cheap as cheap can be. When I started if you spent less than 2 grand you were gonna be struggling 6 months after you got it, now I can build a PC for $450 that will play games for years AND make me a profit. Hell you can buy a fully loaded 6 core AMD for like $250 in a Tiger kit, slap a $50 HD4850 and tada! You can play the vast majority of games with plenty of bling. Spend a little more, say $100 for an HD6850 or $120 for an HD6870 and you'll be gaming on it for the next 4 years, no problem.
So what is there to complain about? The games are cheap, the hardware is cheap, hell you can buy Win 8 for $40 and just use Start8 to kill that Metro crap and have you a cheap gaming PC that will get updates until 2022 and I wouldn't be surprised if the games would all still run on it fine, its rare to see a game require more than a dual core for a minimum even today. These kids just don't realize how good they got it...now get off my lawn!
The problem is more and more of our content is gonna be digital, you have everybody including ALL of the major OSes pushing the appstore model, yet instead of laying lines you have the ISPs putting ever nastier caps. Ever see how much streaming video takes? Or buying a game digitally? I know that I probably went through 50GB on the Steam Summer sale and I wouldn't be surprised if I go through that or more before the Xmas sale is through, how many of those sales do you think they'd get if I was paying $1.50 a GB which is what some of the caps they are proposing run?
This next gen will probably be the LAST generation where the games come on discs, not only are the games getting bigger but digital distribution allows for cheaper games and can all but kill piracy since most won't have the skills to sideload digital games and hack a Xbox 960 or PS5, so what then? because its obvious the ISPs don't give a shit, not if they have the option to just cap the hell out of everybody and keep the profits. We are finally beginning to reach a point where you can truly have the world on demand, movies games and shows will all be cheap and instant, but if the ISPs just keep adding nastier caps the world will get this great new digital age and we'll be stuck on the equivalent of dialup. Of course the stocks will never be higher, have to think of the stockholders ya know.
Oh and to the guy talking about "all the millions of slow DSL or dialup" how many of them have any actual choice? I live in a town of over 20,000 and there is plenty of places where your choice is dialup or nothing, hell when I lived in Nashville a while back there was places even in a city that size where it was dialup or nothing, so who says they have any choice? I have several customers on the lowest DSL so you would count them as "not needing faster" but in reality they all tried the highest tier AT&T had and all it did was raise their bills, speedtest.net showed no change for that extra money. Should they simply give AT&T an extra hundred plus as a prezzie so they'll be counted? I tried the highest tier at my cableco, it gained me a whole 3Mbps and cost $120! more a month for 3Mbps more download and 1Mbps instead of 512Kbps upload. Do you think I wouldn't jump at the chance to get anything faster at a fair rate? Hell its costing me $110 a month now for just net and home phone service, but since their phone don't count against the cap and something like Vonage does its not like i have any options, and in my area if you are LUCKY you'll get 2Mbps DSL, most don't even get 756Kbps.
You simply cannot fix a corrupted system by working within that system, why? Because they will simply change the rules to insure that you can't win silly!
While I was never a fan of Ron Paul (to me libertarianism is just an excuse for rich to hoard and starve the poor and I think if we ever did have a libertarian government we'd have a full scale uprising from the poor within a decade) but frankly anybody that thought they could change things by working within the system should look up "Jon Stewart Ron Paul" to see how truly badly the thing is rigged and how the MSM is in bed with the megacorps controlling the elections. In the Stewart video he shows clip after clip of stations all over the country, national and local, treating Paul as 'he who shall not be named' and even going so far as to name the first, second and FOURTH place finishers in a race. The last clip even has a reporter saying to the anchor "Here we are talking about Christie and Palin, who aren't even in the race, and not Paul who is doing well here" and the anchor gets a douchebag smirk and looks straight at the camera and says "Well if you get Palin or Christie footage send it up, you can keep the Paul stuff" with another douchebag smirk.
Add to this the people in charge of counting votes in several places in NH saying "The numbers the RNC reported were NOT what we handed to them, they aren't even close" or the "voice vote" on allowing the Paul delegation to speak where they caught it on film that the vote results were already on the teleprompter before the vote was even cast? You can give it up friend, all you can do is take as much as you possibly can and wait for the entire rotten mess to collapse which it will, probably in the next decade as the bubble they have blown in the financial market will make the crash of 29 look like a bad weekend when it blows.
Short of violent uprising and revolution there is simply nothing to be done, the same cabal of corps owns the MSM, controls the elections, its all as kayfabe as pro wrestling. Why do you think no matter how you vote nothing changes, and it never gets better? As the lat great George Carlin said "Things will NEVER get better in this country because the owners WANT it this way! They own the country, they own you, and its never gonna get any better!" and he's right, the system is so completely corrupted that it would be impossible to ever fix it, they control what you see and hear, the price of Internet keeps going up to keep more and more peasants away from it, and its never ever gonna get better.
If that is the case I would go with Win 7 Pro, its easy to lock down with GPOs, has XP Mode for any legacy software, and is supported until Apr 2020 so by the time it goes out of support the system will be ready for retirement as well.
I don't know how things are where you are but here with my SMBs I tend to plan the systems for about 7 years of use, ever since Intel and AMD went multicore you really don't need to turn over systems that often. Heck I have plenty of SMB customers on first gen Phenom X3s and X4s and they are quite happy with the performance, the only thing I had to do was move them to Win 7 from XP and they are happy as clams.
That said if the customer insisted on Linux? I'd probably go with a prebuilt from System76, its the path with the least margin for errors. it'll already be installed, already be set up, just put in whatever software they need that doesn't come with a default install and bob's your uncle.
But don't SUSE and RHEL require sever contracts to get updates? that would probably make going the server route not a good deal.
I still think the best bet would be to go AMD AM3, you can get a complete 6 core kit for $260 after MIR and if you can get by with a dual or quad you can shave another $70 or so off that. The board is using the 760 chipset, that is a Radeon 3000 which I'm pretty sure is well supported under the FOSS drivers and I've used these board before and it uses a combo of EFI and BIOS so you don't have to worry about a locked UEFI.
I tried looking for 760 drivers specifically but it looks like its baked in to Ubuntu and most of the popular distros and since the chipset is 4 years old it should be well supported. I'd say its the best bet, supports plenty of RAM, plenty of SATA drives, and it'll run anything from a dual to an octocore so there is plenty of upgrade potential here but with the X6 chips so cheap I'd probably go with the X6, after all when not in use it'll drop the power and speed of half the cores so its like having a fast triple core and when they do need the extra cycles you'll have 6 cores to call on.
Wow...you really have NO clue how this stuff actually works, do you? Look up the word "filibuster" and then look up how many times its been used in the past 5 years, you'll find out its been used more in the past 5 years than it was used for the hundred years preceding!
It doesn't matter how many votes one side or the other has as long as they have the filibuster as they can just block anything from coming to a vote.
I hate to say this but in this case it does work well...pick up one of those $40 Windows 8 downloads. While Metro sucks hairy balls as an office desktop one place where it DOES work great is as a 10 foot UI, those metro tiles are easy to see and hit from across the room and then you'll have support for Netflix as well as all the Windows software out there. Also with hybrid boot and on demand services its faster to boot and a little lighter on memory than Win 7 is so while it makes a piss poor laptop or desktop OS for HTPCs the OS really shines.
Damned shame they didn't make metro optional so that you could switch it off for desktops and on for tablets and HTPCs but for your use case Win 8 actually works quite well.
Uhhh...where did I say that Apple owned either? I simply said they gave back with those two more than they have taken out by using the kernel, that's all. Just as AMD doesn't actually "own" the AMD FOSS driver but were paying several full time devs to work on it, thus giving back to the community.
The problem with the GPL in a nutshell is the redistribution clause, you could remove that tomorrow and the "printer story" would still be 100% solved while actually giving an incentive for companies to fix all the messes in Linux as they could make their money back. Instead because so much software doesn't fall into the "blessed three" model what you get is what I call the "busted shitter problem" in that if I ask you to paint me a picture or write a song? I'll have several free to choose from, some of them probably quite good. If I ask you to come fix my nasty busted shitter for free? i better get used to pissing in the sink.
Whether the "FOSSie faction" that thinks GPL is law accept it or not there are a LOT of jobs in software and OS development that are every bit as nasty as cleaning that busted shitter. there is bug and regression testing, QA, documentation, bug fixing, MSFT, Apple and Google pay millions to get these nasty jobs done, in Linux? they just don't get done at all which is why Linux doesn't gain any on the desktop. hell how many FOSS programs have placeholders instead of completed docs? and that is a hell of a lot less nasty and boring than QC and regression testing but because nobody can make a cent doing it then it simply don't get done.
I think the next 5 years will be interesting and if the GPL doesn't change in that time it will become more and more irrelevant outside the server room. Not only do you have the rise of the appstore, not only do you have Android taking jobs that formerly went to embedded Linux, but I would argue the days of the support contract, the bread and butter on which a LOT of FOSS depends to survive, is frankly over as more corps forgo contracts and just hire consultants for one off jobs or go to cloud based. Ironically I predict its the cloud that will end up seriously wounding if not killing Red hat, as last stats I saw had nearly 50% of the cloud servers running free CentOS over paid for RHEL and as the economy continues to sour I bet that number goes nowhere but up. If Linux didn't have the redistribution clause all those sales WOULD have been for RH, which gives more back to the community than the other top 5 corps combined, instead the redistribution clause will mean RH has to compete with their own product being given away free.
You joke but unless he buys a prebuilt from someone like System76 that is pretty much it, by the time anything makes it to the compatible hardware list its not being sold in retail any longer. I'd tell him to buy Intel but hell not even that is a safe bet anymore as Intel has put out a few based on PowerVR that aren't compatible.
So the only real choice is to buy prebuilt or just roll the dice, nothing else you can do really. if it were me given this task i would probably be looking at some socket AM3 boards, they can be found pretty cheap and last I checked the FOSS drivers supported the 7xx chipsets that most of the AM3 boards use. Also you can get really nice AMD quads dirt cheap right now so it would also cut down on the cost of the final build while still giving them plenty of power.
Type "Jobs on PPC" and you'll see what I am talking about, they had both the X86 and PPC versions of OSX up and running and he chose to stick with PPC instead of going with X86 right off the bat and he says that hurt the company as IBM never could produce a G5 that wasn't a space heater so they were stuck on the much slower G4 for the critical mobile line.
As for Be, it was clear even in 94 that Intel was getting the clocks up faster than IBM was and by 98 you'd have to be blind not to realize that the leaps Intel was making would be damned difficult to match. When IBM was bragging about 30Mhz speed boost Intel was sometimes doubling their clocks over the previous release and with the economy of scale they were getting not to mention how many devs were already familiar with the arch? It was pretty obvious PPC was gonna not be able to keep up. I predict the same will happen to ARM within 5 years because they simply can't find a way to scale IPC on the ARM chips, Nvidia has invested millions in R&D and are now up to 5 cores on their Tegra chips just trying to boost IPC. Since Intel has the fabs and the R&D budget frankly it'll be easier for them to simply shave off some of the IPC of their design and come in under the power envelope than it will be to scale ARM up, so what we will have is X86 VS PPC all over again.
And finally look up the "Windows Blue" roadmap, basically MSFT is gonna try to buttfuck the OEMs by making laptops, phones, and tablets in house (so their ripping off of Apple will be complete) while royally fucking the OEMs on licensing to not only make their products noncompetitive but to subsidize MSFT's entry into the market. This will be a golden opportunity for Google to sit down with those OEMs and as I said it really wouldn't be hard to add a true offline mode to ChromeOS along with something like crossover to support legacy windows applications. If the OEMs are selling Chromebooks for $200-$500 and the same hardware with Windows costs more than double that? Google could snatch up a LOT of the market and leave MSFT in the same shape RIM is in now, with a bunch of legacy clients looking at exit strategies. The numbers don't lie, win 8 is a flop, Surface is a flop, but rather than accept that Ballmer is gonna go full retard and try to remake MSFT into an ersatz Apple. i predict the result of this will be MSFT losing share like there is no tomorrow, as people simply don't buy or buy Google instead.
Might want to look at the Win 8 figures again friend, Its clear that Windows 8 is a failure and sales are down more than 13% compred to this period last year and the OEMs are putting the blame squarely on win 8 and the new upscale marketing strategy. Also MSFT themselves are cutting surface orders in half because they can't move what they have. Is Ballmer gonna look at the numbers and wake the fuck up? Nope instead he is going full steam ahead in making their own PCs and phones proving that Ballmer is fully prepared to go full retard.
I'd say the numbers are clear as a bell and the consumer has spoken, given the choice of a $1000 Apple ripoff and the real thing they are gonna choose Apple, its better branding makes Windows a non starter in that market. Again its like slapping a coat of paint on a Pinto and expecting it to compete with Porsche, its just not gonna happen. Mark my words if they don't fire Ballmer and bring somebody in who has actual vision that consists of more than "What is Apple doing? We'll do that" then in 5 years MSFT is gonna be in the same boat as RIM, with a dwindling legacy base and no growth. The OEMs aren't gonna jump off a cliff to please MSFT, they'll crank out Chromebooks and Android units before closing the doors and Google will be more than happy to take that business. History will put Ballmer right next to the Pepsi guy as "worst CEOs ever" and MSFT will be just another footnote in history. Either you listen to your customers or you die, simple as that.
Not to mention pre-Islam Arabs, much of our higher math theory started with the Arabs. Sadly they also showed us what happens when religion takes over as once Islam became dominant their advancement of math and science pretty much died and has never returned to its former glory.
But considering how anti-science mainstream Christianity has been of late I do agree it takes some big brass balls to try to take credit for the enlightenment when you have churches wanting creationism taught as a scientific fact.
Then you should have asked old Hairy as you just didn't know what to look for. If you were my customer I'd ask "What do you want it to do?" and could easily tailor a quiet or even completely noise free system to your requirements. If all you are wanting is a standard noise free HTPC that does 1080P I'd recommend this E350 kit as it has but a single tiny fan on the CPU and is quiet as a churchmouse, and is quite easy to customize to what you want it to do. I'd put a 2GB or 4GB stick along with a 1TB HDD and then its up to you whether you want BD or DVD.
Having built several of these systems I can tell you that it blows a WD Live away, as long as you use fast memory (I recommend the 1333 over the 1066) you can play quite a few games on it, I've personally run L4D, Portal 1 & 2 and Torchlight 1 & 2 on one, and if you want even more power and the ability to play the latest games frankly it isn't hard to slap a Zalman silent on an Athlon or Phenom X4, you simply can't use the mini VCR case due to the size of the heatsink. I've found most of my customers don't really care about the mini VCR case when they see they can have something like this that looks quite stylish sitting next to the TV table, but again if you want to do heavy gaming one will have to put up with a fan or spend more on silent coolers, its all a trade off.
But at the end of the day you really need to look at how long the unit will last, I have a couple of customers that have first gen Athlon X2s I built HTPCs around and they are still happy more than 6 years later, all I did was up the storage when they started running low and as drive prices dropped. and unlike the consoles or smart TVs they can still surf the latest websites, use the latest software, watch flash no problem, its really not hard to build a quiet HTPC with just a little thought beforehand.
While I agree to a point as somebody who has raised two kids there are certain things you don't want a little kid exposed to, hell as an adult I wish I could have some brain bleach to remove some of the things I have seen (two girls anyone?) but more to the point the problem here is NOT the porn, its the fact that these companies are just taking trade ins and throwing them in a box and calling them refurbs when they are not.
I sell plenty of refurbs in the shop and I would never EVER even think about putting out a system that hadn't been wiped and reloaded, its just a sign of piss poor store policy to allow such a thing to even happen. If its a system with a restore partition I will zero out the user partition before restoring and if not I'm zeroing out the entire drive, but there really is no excuse to leaving shit on a refurb. What if it had been infected with malware? I haven't messed with hand helds in years so I don't know if they make a cable to plug into a PC or not but I have seen plenty of devices, both "refurb" and even those listed as "new" that customers have picked up to find they are full of malware and other nasties. I once had to clean all the computers in a church because one of the volunteers picked up a "new" backup drive at Worst Buy and not only was it full of porn but it was also infected by a clickjacker bug that spread like wildfire through their network and they were getting porn popups by the hundreds.
So there really is no excuse, whether the device is supposed to be for a 5 year old or a 50 year old it should have been restored to factory state before being sold, and I really can't blame a parent for being upset about finding porn on a little kid's Xmas present. Remember thanks to the Internet there is no telling what kind of porn was on the thing,and while I wouldn't be thrilled that somebody left straight porn for my 5 year old to find that is a hell of a lot different than something like two girls or beast porn or any of the other sick shit you find on the net.
Well considering the how to write a Linux virus in 5 easy steps article uses Python and when I search for "Python malware" I get over 600,000 hits? There is probably plenty of Python malware already out there, it just doesn't get as much press as a Windows bug as it has a smaller target. But as long as there is the potential to make money on infected machines I'm sure that somebody will be targeting just about every combo of language and OS you can think of, no OS is immune to a targeted attack.
Now that said I have to deal with some customers that are...sigh...can you say "click happy" and clueless? So after many hours of trying various combos on test boxes here at the shop I have come up with what I call my "foolproof Windows for fools" that makes the machines as solid as tanks and cuts the living hell out of the risk of malware. basically short of them going "Why yes, please infect my machine" which sadly I have had to deal with at least once, well short of them going the extra mile to be super stupid you'll have a system that short of hardware failure won't be going anywhere. For those that want to know how, recipe is as follows:
1.-First make sure their software is all up to date and Windows is set to automatically download and install patches, otherwise they are likely to just ignore the patches and leave the machine vulnerable.
2.- Get a low rights mode browser with ABP, any Chromium based will do but I use Comodo Dragon as it has privalert which will block all the tracking crap and you can choose to use Comodo Secure DNS in the browser only, this helps to block a LOT of infected websites from loading in the first place.
3.- For an AV I recommend either Avast Free or Comodo IS, both have their pluses. Avast AV is a little more "chatty" about what its doing and I found some folks really like that, Comodo IS has built in sandboxing and is easy to configure for the actual user, so its really up to you as both are quite good at stopping malware.
4.- Install FileHippo Update Checker and have it set to run at startup, it only uses a couple hundred KB of memory and will tell them when their third party software is out of date as well as provide links to the software, this keeps them from downloading "flash updates" and other dubious software updates. if the Hippo doesn't say it needs updating then it don't need updating.
5.-Finally you need to have a hidden backup and restore partition, just in case they ever manage to figure a way to get infected or if a family member comes over and trashes things. I am testing Paragon Drive backup for this roll but since I haven't finished testing I'd have to go with Comodo Time Machine but be aware its no longer supported and I don't think its been tested with Windows 8. That said the nice thing here is you can lock a snapshot with everything set up and all the third party software loaded so you have your own "OEM restore partition" without the trialware crap and it can also create snapshots on a schedule and be accessed if the machine can't even boot to desktop by just pushing the Home key. this way if they manage to somehow seriously screw up the OS a single push of the Home key and 20 minutes later they are back up and running.
With these 5 little steps that takes less than an hour all told you will have a machine you can let the most clueless users get a hold of and not have to worry about them borking the system I have several "click happy" customers that have been on this system for over 2 years now and not a single bug, runs just as good as when I handed it to them. In fact I have only had to help one that has been on this system, she forgot to log off and her 16 year old niece got on after she left and did God knows what to the system so it wouldn't boot to desktop. 15 minu
If you like the XBMC UI and want to build an HTPC dirt cheap you really should check out OpenELEC as its built around the XBMC UI and has pre-builds for all the major designs, Atom/ION, AMD Fusion, standard Intel or AMD, etc and even comes with PVR software baked in.
That said I looked into smart TVs before going HTPC with my family and the problem is it is proprietary city, everybody is making their own UIs and nothing is standardized and they all frankly suck. its more about trying to lock you into their ecosystem than it is making a truly great UI and it shows, slow loads, clunky UIs, problems with compatibility with this code or that website, its just a giant PITA.
I built an AMD Bobcat based HTPC for mom and an Athlon X2 based for dad (because he wanted to be able to access his shop cams and so needed a little beefier CPU) and its like night and day compared to the smart TVs. They can run all their programs (I went win 7 HP with XBMC but Win 8 actually works good in this regard as metro is practically a 10 foot UI already), everything is snappy, I slapped in a 1TB HDD and ripped all their CDs and DVDs so if mom wants to watch her horror movies or dad his action its just a push of the button, they can chat, surf, its just so much nicer than the clunky slow smart TVs it wasn't really any comparison.
My only advice would be if you want small and low power get the Bobcat, I ended up having to use a nice black mini-tower instead of a VCR style on dad to fit a silent heatsink, unlike the Bobcat the Athlons do generate some heat and all the mini CPU coolers i found either ran hot or sounded like an F15 taking off. That said I have paired a cheap Athlon or Phenom II X4 with an HD4850 ($30-$40 at Geeks) for several customers that wanted to game and they are quite happy, playing Batman:AC and Saints Row 3 and thanks to all the Steam sales its a lot cheaper than the consoles to build a collection and of course no discs to mess with or lose either.
This is why guys like me that build HTPCs aren't worried about "smart TVs"...because they suck. They aren't updated very often (if at all) and use seriously weak chips anyway so what you end up with is a really poor experience.
My advice would be to look at a DIY kit for an HTPC. If you want high def and low power you should look at an AMD Bobcat, if you don't care about HD you can get an Intel Atom (yes I know about ION but they aren't common or easy to come by anymore and its dead end tech since Nvidia left the chipset biz) and if you want to game or be able to transcode an Athlon or even a Phenom X6 if you can find it on sale would be good.
The nice thing about an HTPC is that you can have the latest browser, flash is no problem, it'll easily take wireless remotes (The Lenovo mini-keyboard with trackball is the one I recommend if you want a small and light remote, easily fits in one hand), Steam had big picture mode which is great for an HTPC, hell its one of the few places Windows 8 makes sense as that fugly metro makes a great 10 foot UI as the tiles are easy to hit. For those that don't want to spend the whole $40 for Win 8 there is OpenELEC which is free, has the XBMC front end, even comes with PVR software baked in and is pre-compiled for various chips so you simply pick the one you've got and away you go.
Once you try an HTPC you'll see how truly limited these "Smart TVs" are and will not want to go back. With the HTPC you can do everything a normal PC can, plus use it as a media tank, with all your movies and music loaded and ready to go, it can play games like a console, and you don't have to use some limited browser that most likely won't be getting updates and is slow to begin with. With OpenELEC you can build one for less than $150, Win 8 less than $200, and frankly the things will just last and last. The whole "Smart TV" is a nice novelty but use it any length of time and as you pointed out the limitations start showing pretty quickly, same with using the consoles to surf.
Why would a Catholic have any problem with someone having their tubes tied? its not aborting a child, its simply keeping the woman from getting pregnant in the first place.
Of course since we are talking about a religion where a bishop in Africa told his followers that the condoms being handed out were infected with aids as a way to wipe out black people? Frankly it wouldn't surprise me if there is some bullshit edict. if we listened to every nutball religion out there frankly we'd still be in the dark ages, time to grow the fuck up and stop making plans based on whether it will offend a sky bully or not.
No I figured it was yet another country getting what they paid for while we get fucked by the corps and end up on the short bus to the info superhighway.
Despite what Wolfram & Hart...err I mean Goldman Sachs says we have actually paid over 200 billion in the form of massive tax breaks and other incentives to get nationwide fiber over a decade ago, what did we get? A low res Goatse from the ISPs who gave their CEOs bonuses with the money.
Scream socialism all you want but the ONLY WAY we are gonna get nationwide fiber is to nationalize the system, have the states lay it just like the roads, and then lease the lines to the companies who will have to compete for customers. because we are already falling behind the rest of the planet, hell Romania is kicking our ass when it comes to bandwidth, and we have already seen that rather than lay lines the corps will just put ever nastier caps while pocketing the profits. You can't have a free market when most people are stuck with a duopoly at best, most with only a monopoly, so we really have no choice but to nationalize the system.
After all if 200 billion in tax breaks and other incentives couldn't get the ISPs to lay down shit what makes anybody think they will just because their customers want netflix? They know they have you by the balls, so it'll be ever nastier caps and ever worse service while the rest of the world passes us by.
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Uhhh, nothing wrong with the AMD drivers in Windows, once AMD took over they got rid of the retarded .NET crap ATI was using and they have been working quite well since. i must have built close to triple didgits with AMD graphics, no problems. As for Windows I said you can get Win 8 for $40 and kill the Metro crap with Start8 but if it were me I'd spend a little more and get an OEM copy of Win 7 HP. Look around and they can be found between $80-$110, which considering it'll get updates until 2020 figures up to something like $15 a year, cheap as chips.
But again we frankly have never had it so good. I have probably over 100 games (don't feel like firing up Steam and counting) and I paid MAYBE $120 for the lot, all the games triple A, I paid less than $60 for a 256bit graphics card with over 900 stream processors, and I have a six core CPU that is fast and chews through everything I throw at it for which I paid a whole $105 with shipping. For PC gamers life is good.
Oh and for the one that pointed out THQ filed for bankruptcy? Might want to look at WHY they filed, it had nothing to do with PC games, it had to do with a moron in the company thinking spending 110 MILLION buying drawing tablets for the Wii was a good idea. They have a warehouse full of the things and can't get jack shit for them, they'll probably end up in a landfill somewhere. At least with PC games even if you make a turkey you can price it right and sell a lot of units, hell I bought Kane & Lynch II and Duke Nukem Forever when they hit $5 each just to see how bad they really are. BTW if anybody wonders? Duke is ruined by shitty weapons, not a single good gun in the whole damned game, Kane and Lynch is ruined by targeting, you can stand 3 feet from a guy and empty an Uzi and not hit him. Still worth $5 to laugh at though.
And I was happy to call out Jobs and Ballmer when they were acting like douchebags as well, especially when in a case like this the guy had a legit question (even if he was going the wrong way about fixing the problem) and it would have taken all of 30 seconds of being civil and explaining where the mistake was, or even "why it must be thus" but nope, instead of acting like a civil human being Torvalds turned it to 11 on the prick scale and he deserves to be called on it.
Not to mention everybody is completely missing the point, which is thus:...the guy is working on a complex subsystem with some serious driver issues, and he made a mistake, so what? in a complex project mistakes are gonna happen. He points out that the behavior of a good portion of the drivers is exactly like what he wrote therefor Pulse is gonna break with all those drivers as well which is why he thinks its a Pulse problem, because the kernel guys didn't write ALL those drivers, and the Pulse locking is gonna be puking when it gets to ANY of those drivers, which are many.
ALL LINUS HAD TO DO was spend a lousy 30 seconds saying "That may be, but here is how you should go about this" and done, that's it, problem solved, explanation given, error corrected. Does he do this? Nope he goes total apeshit and acts like a five year old that had his toy broken and just goes fucking nuts, when the other guy was actually acting like a rational human being. I'm sorry but dramaqueen douchebag of the week goes to Linus Torvalds for having a shitfit and big giant freakout when a simple 30 second explanation would have solved the whole thing with ZERO drama involved.
And people wonder why Linux devs have this rep of being little elitist jerks? this is the kind of behavior I'd expect from Drepper, NOT Torvalds.
Not to mention everybody seems to be ignoring what the guy was working on, he pointed out the drivers for the built in webcams on laptops is getting EXTREMELY complex and harder and harder to debug so they were trying to simply make it less of a mess. Did he fuck up? Yes but frankly there was no call for acting like a fucking dramaqueen douchebag, he's working on an extremely complex subsystem and made a mistake...no fucking shit, nobody working on a big complex project has ever made a fuckup?
And don't give me Torvald's "we never break userland" excuse, because as the guy pointed out Pulse is locking ALL the interfaces when it takes over and that naturally is gonna cause problems when you are talking about a 2 way device like a webcam with audio. If Torvalds didn't like his approach it would have taken him a whole 30 seconds to say "We just don't do things that way, here is what you should have done" but no, he completely flies off the handle and acts like a total prick.
Meh the list sucks, no Lumia, no Surface, no Windows 8. When you look at how much money has been shat right down the drain launching those 3 products its just insanity and its pretty much agreed by most that all 3 are megabombs. Just look at the figures of the Surface, as low as 500k after massive advertising and with Windows 8 the finger pointing has begun with OEMs coming out of the woodwork to say Win 8 is a poor product (the latest is Fujitsu, I'd provide a link but its on Yahoo Finance which creates insanely long URLs) and Ballmer proving he's not afraid to go full retard by basically giving the finger to the OEMs and deciding to make overpriced laptops, phones, and desktops so that if anybody doubted Ballmer's MSFT was just a poorly built Apple those doubts are over.
I don't see how this could be anything but the #1 spot, we are talking billions of dollars wasted on products nobody wanted, retailers can't move the things and in fact the sales from Oct-Dec were down 13% over the same period last year and so far every indication is its Win 8 that kept those shoppers away, we are talking HP buying Palm levels of uberfail here folks. I believe history will look back on this and say this was when we saw that marketing droids simply can't shovel overpriced shit down the throats of consumers and get them to buy based on nothing but flashy ads, because 4 billion in flashy ads couldn't keep Lumia and Win 8 from being another Vista. Talk about a trainwreck, this deserves the "WTF were they thinking?" award of 2012, no competition came even close to this level of fail.
Celeb or not I'd tell Torvalds to kiss my ass. I thought maybe that was at the end of a conversation...nope, the guy asks a simple question , one that would have taken Torvalds all of 30 seconds to explain like a rational human being, and instead he goes instantly to 11 on the douchebag scale.
I don't give a flying fuck WHO it is, be it Torvalds or Ballmer or Cook or Ellison if someone acts like a total fucking douchebag they should be called out for it and I'm calling him out, Linus Torvalds you sir are a douchebag. you could have solved the whole fucking thing in under 30 seconds by simply explaining why "it must be thus" but instead just acted like a giant flaming prick, it was completely uncalled for, the other guy was acting complete civil and politely, therefor the asshole of the week award should be given to Torvalds for flying so completely off the handle when there was zero point in it.
I'll add get rid of X-Server and give us something better than Pulse which seems to crap itself on update more times than I can count.
But personally I don't know why anybody would bitch about PC gaming now, if anything I'd say we are in the middle of another golden age. I have NEVER been able to get games as cheaply as I am now under Steam, I'm talking whole catalogs for less than the cost of a single console game (such as the THQ bundle for $30, great set) and the cards and chips? Cheap as cheap can be. When I started if you spent less than 2 grand you were gonna be struggling 6 months after you got it, now I can build a PC for $450 that will play games for years AND make me a profit. Hell you can buy a fully loaded 6 core AMD for like $250 in a Tiger kit, slap a $50 HD4850 and tada! You can play the vast majority of games with plenty of bling. Spend a little more, say $100 for an HD6850 or $120 for an HD6870 and you'll be gaming on it for the next 4 years, no problem.
So what is there to complain about? The games are cheap, the hardware is cheap, hell you can buy Win 8 for $40 and just use Start8 to kill that Metro crap and have you a cheap gaming PC that will get updates until 2022 and I wouldn't be surprised if the games would all still run on it fine, its rare to see a game require more than a dual core for a minimum even today. These kids just don't realize how good they got it...now get off my lawn!
The problem is more and more of our content is gonna be digital, you have everybody including ALL of the major OSes pushing the appstore model, yet instead of laying lines you have the ISPs putting ever nastier caps. Ever see how much streaming video takes? Or buying a game digitally? I know that I probably went through 50GB on the Steam Summer sale and I wouldn't be surprised if I go through that or more before the Xmas sale is through, how many of those sales do you think they'd get if I was paying $1.50 a GB which is what some of the caps they are proposing run?
This next gen will probably be the LAST generation where the games come on discs, not only are the games getting bigger but digital distribution allows for cheaper games and can all but kill piracy since most won't have the skills to sideload digital games and hack a Xbox 960 or PS5, so what then? because its obvious the ISPs don't give a shit, not if they have the option to just cap the hell out of everybody and keep the profits. We are finally beginning to reach a point where you can truly have the world on demand, movies games and shows will all be cheap and instant, but if the ISPs just keep adding nastier caps the world will get this great new digital age and we'll be stuck on the equivalent of dialup. Of course the stocks will never be higher, have to think of the stockholders ya know.
Oh and to the guy talking about "all the millions of slow DSL or dialup" how many of them have any actual choice? I live in a town of over 20,000 and there is plenty of places where your choice is dialup or nothing, hell when I lived in Nashville a while back there was places even in a city that size where it was dialup or nothing, so who says they have any choice? I have several customers on the lowest DSL so you would count them as "not needing faster" but in reality they all tried the highest tier AT&T had and all it did was raise their bills, speedtest.net showed no change for that extra money. Should they simply give AT&T an extra hundred plus as a prezzie so they'll be counted? I tried the highest tier at my cableco, it gained me a whole 3Mbps and cost $120! more a month for 3Mbps more download and 1Mbps instead of 512Kbps upload. Do you think I wouldn't jump at the chance to get anything faster at a fair rate? Hell its costing me $110 a month now for just net and home phone service, but since their phone don't count against the cap and something like Vonage does its not like i have any options, and in my area if you are LUCKY you'll get 2Mbps DSL, most don't even get 756Kbps.
You simply cannot fix a corrupted system by working within that system, why? Because they will simply change the rules to insure that you can't win silly!
While I was never a fan of Ron Paul (to me libertarianism is just an excuse for rich to hoard and starve the poor and I think if we ever did have a libertarian government we'd have a full scale uprising from the poor within a decade) but frankly anybody that thought they could change things by working within the system should look up "Jon Stewart Ron Paul" to see how truly badly the thing is rigged and how the MSM is in bed with the megacorps controlling the elections. In the Stewart video he shows clip after clip of stations all over the country, national and local, treating Paul as 'he who shall not be named' and even going so far as to name the first, second and FOURTH place finishers in a race. The last clip even has a reporter saying to the anchor "Here we are talking about Christie and Palin, who aren't even in the race, and not Paul who is doing well here" and the anchor gets a douchebag smirk and looks straight at the camera and says "Well if you get Palin or Christie footage send it up, you can keep the Paul stuff" with another douchebag smirk.
Add to this the people in charge of counting votes in several places in NH saying "The numbers the RNC reported were NOT what we handed to them, they aren't even close" or the "voice vote" on allowing the Paul delegation to speak where they caught it on film that the vote results were already on the teleprompter before the vote was even cast? You can give it up friend, all you can do is take as much as you possibly can and wait for the entire rotten mess to collapse which it will, probably in the next decade as the bubble they have blown in the financial market will make the crash of 29 look like a bad weekend when it blows.
Short of violent uprising and revolution there is simply nothing to be done, the same cabal of corps owns the MSM, controls the elections, its all as kayfabe as pro wrestling. Why do you think no matter how you vote nothing changes, and it never gets better? As the lat great George Carlin said "Things will NEVER get better in this country because the owners WANT it this way! They own the country, they own you, and its never gonna get any better!" and he's right, the system is so completely corrupted that it would be impossible to ever fix it, they control what you see and hear, the price of Internet keeps going up to keep more and more peasants away from it, and its never ever gonna get better.
If that is the case I would go with Win 7 Pro, its easy to lock down with GPOs, has XP Mode for any legacy software, and is supported until Apr 2020 so by the time it goes out of support the system will be ready for retirement as well.
I don't know how things are where you are but here with my SMBs I tend to plan the systems for about 7 years of use, ever since Intel and AMD went multicore you really don't need to turn over systems that often. Heck I have plenty of SMB customers on first gen Phenom X3s and X4s and they are quite happy with the performance, the only thing I had to do was move them to Win 7 from XP and they are happy as clams.
That said if the customer insisted on Linux? I'd probably go with a prebuilt from System76, its the path with the least margin for errors. it'll already be installed, already be set up, just put in whatever software they need that doesn't come with a default install and bob's your uncle.
But don't SUSE and RHEL require sever contracts to get updates? that would probably make going the server route not a good deal.
I still think the best bet would be to go AMD AM3, you can get a complete 6 core kit for $260 after MIR and if you can get by with a dual or quad you can shave another $70 or so off that. The board is using the 760 chipset, that is a Radeon 3000 which I'm pretty sure is well supported under the FOSS drivers and I've used these board before and it uses a combo of EFI and BIOS so you don't have to worry about a locked UEFI.
I tried looking for 760 drivers specifically but it looks like its baked in to Ubuntu and most of the popular distros and since the chipset is 4 years old it should be well supported. I'd say its the best bet, supports plenty of RAM, plenty of SATA drives, and it'll run anything from a dual to an octocore so there is plenty of upgrade potential here but with the X6 chips so cheap I'd probably go with the X6, after all when not in use it'll drop the power and speed of half the cores so its like having a fast triple core and when they do need the extra cycles you'll have 6 cores to call on.
Wow...you really have NO clue how this stuff actually works, do you? Look up the word "filibuster" and then look up how many times its been used in the past 5 years, you'll find out its been used more in the past 5 years than it was used for the hundred years preceding!
It doesn't matter how many votes one side or the other has as long as they have the filibuster as they can just block anything from coming to a vote.
I hate to say this but in this case it does work well...pick up one of those $40 Windows 8 downloads. While Metro sucks hairy balls as an office desktop one place where it DOES work great is as a 10 foot UI, those metro tiles are easy to see and hit from across the room and then you'll have support for Netflix as well as all the Windows software out there. Also with hybrid boot and on demand services its faster to boot and a little lighter on memory than Win 7 is so while it makes a piss poor laptop or desktop OS for HTPCs the OS really shines.
Damned shame they didn't make metro optional so that you could switch it off for desktops and on for tablets and HTPCs but for your use case Win 8 actually works quite well.
Uhhh...where did I say that Apple owned either? I simply said they gave back with those two more than they have taken out by using the kernel, that's all. Just as AMD doesn't actually "own" the AMD FOSS driver but were paying several full time devs to work on it, thus giving back to the community.
The problem with the GPL in a nutshell is the redistribution clause, you could remove that tomorrow and the "printer story" would still be 100% solved while actually giving an incentive for companies to fix all the messes in Linux as they could make their money back. Instead because so much software doesn't fall into the "blessed three" model what you get is what I call the "busted shitter problem" in that if I ask you to paint me a picture or write a song? I'll have several free to choose from, some of them probably quite good. If I ask you to come fix my nasty busted shitter for free? i better get used to pissing in the sink.
Whether the "FOSSie faction" that thinks GPL is law accept it or not there are a LOT of jobs in software and OS development that are every bit as nasty as cleaning that busted shitter. there is bug and regression testing, QA, documentation, bug fixing, MSFT, Apple and Google pay millions to get these nasty jobs done, in Linux? they just don't get done at all which is why Linux doesn't gain any on the desktop. hell how many FOSS programs have placeholders instead of completed docs? and that is a hell of a lot less nasty and boring than QC and regression testing but because nobody can make a cent doing it then it simply don't get done.
I think the next 5 years will be interesting and if the GPL doesn't change in that time it will become more and more irrelevant outside the server room. Not only do you have the rise of the appstore, not only do you have Android taking jobs that formerly went to embedded Linux, but I would argue the days of the support contract, the bread and butter on which a LOT of FOSS depends to survive, is frankly over as more corps forgo contracts and just hire consultants for one off jobs or go to cloud based. Ironically I predict its the cloud that will end up seriously wounding if not killing Red hat, as last stats I saw had nearly 50% of the cloud servers running free CentOS over paid for RHEL and as the economy continues to sour I bet that number goes nowhere but up. If Linux didn't have the redistribution clause all those sales WOULD have been for RH, which gives more back to the community than the other top 5 corps combined, instead the redistribution clause will mean RH has to compete with their own product being given away free.
You joke but unless he buys a prebuilt from someone like System76 that is pretty much it, by the time anything makes it to the compatible hardware list its not being sold in retail any longer. I'd tell him to buy Intel but hell not even that is a safe bet anymore as Intel has put out a few based on PowerVR that aren't compatible.
So the only real choice is to buy prebuilt or just roll the dice, nothing else you can do really. if it were me given this task i would probably be looking at some socket AM3 boards, they can be found pretty cheap and last I checked the FOSS drivers supported the 7xx chipsets that most of the AM3 boards use. Also you can get really nice AMD quads dirt cheap right now so it would also cut down on the cost of the final build while still giving them plenty of power.
Type "Jobs on PPC" and you'll see what I am talking about, they had both the X86 and PPC versions of OSX up and running and he chose to stick with PPC instead of going with X86 right off the bat and he says that hurt the company as IBM never could produce a G5 that wasn't a space heater so they were stuck on the much slower G4 for the critical mobile line.
As for Be, it was clear even in 94 that Intel was getting the clocks up faster than IBM was and by 98 you'd have to be blind not to realize that the leaps Intel was making would be damned difficult to match. When IBM was bragging about 30Mhz speed boost Intel was sometimes doubling their clocks over the previous release and with the economy of scale they were getting not to mention how many devs were already familiar with the arch? It was pretty obvious PPC was gonna not be able to keep up. I predict the same will happen to ARM within 5 years because they simply can't find a way to scale IPC on the ARM chips, Nvidia has invested millions in R&D and are now up to 5 cores on their Tegra chips just trying to boost IPC. Since Intel has the fabs and the R&D budget frankly it'll be easier for them to simply shave off some of the IPC of their design and come in under the power envelope than it will be to scale ARM up, so what we will have is X86 VS PPC all over again.
And finally look up the "Windows Blue" roadmap, basically MSFT is gonna try to buttfuck the OEMs by making laptops, phones, and tablets in house (so their ripping off of Apple will be complete) while royally fucking the OEMs on licensing to not only make their products noncompetitive but to subsidize MSFT's entry into the market. This will be a golden opportunity for Google to sit down with those OEMs and as I said it really wouldn't be hard to add a true offline mode to ChromeOS along with something like crossover to support legacy windows applications. If the OEMs are selling Chromebooks for $200-$500 and the same hardware with Windows costs more than double that? Google could snatch up a LOT of the market and leave MSFT in the same shape RIM is in now, with a bunch of legacy clients looking at exit strategies. The numbers don't lie, win 8 is a flop, Surface is a flop, but rather than accept that Ballmer is gonna go full retard and try to remake MSFT into an ersatz Apple. i predict the result of this will be MSFT losing share like there is no tomorrow, as people simply don't buy or buy Google instead.
Might want to look at the Win 8 figures again friend, Its clear that Windows 8 is a failure and sales are down more than 13% compred to this period last year and the OEMs are putting the blame squarely on win 8 and the new upscale marketing strategy. Also MSFT themselves are cutting surface orders in half because they can't move what they have. Is Ballmer gonna look at the numbers and wake the fuck up? Nope instead he is going full steam ahead in making their own PCs and phones proving that Ballmer is fully prepared to go full retard.
I'd say the numbers are clear as a bell and the consumer has spoken, given the choice of a $1000 Apple ripoff and the real thing they are gonna choose Apple, its better branding makes Windows a non starter in that market. Again its like slapping a coat of paint on a Pinto and expecting it to compete with Porsche, its just not gonna happen. Mark my words if they don't fire Ballmer and bring somebody in who has actual vision that consists of more than "What is Apple doing? We'll do that" then in 5 years MSFT is gonna be in the same boat as RIM, with a dwindling legacy base and no growth. The OEMs aren't gonna jump off a cliff to please MSFT, they'll crank out Chromebooks and Android units before closing the doors and Google will be more than happy to take that business. History will put Ballmer right next to the Pepsi guy as "worst CEOs ever" and MSFT will be just another footnote in history. Either you listen to your customers or you die, simple as that.
Not to mention pre-Islam Arabs, much of our higher math theory started with the Arabs. Sadly they also showed us what happens when religion takes over as once Islam became dominant their advancement of math and science pretty much died and has never returned to its former glory.
But considering how anti-science mainstream Christianity has been of late I do agree it takes some big brass balls to try to take credit for the enlightenment when you have churches wanting creationism taught as a scientific fact.
Then you should have asked old Hairy as you just didn't know what to look for. If you were my customer I'd ask "What do you want it to do?" and could easily tailor a quiet or even completely noise free system to your requirements. If all you are wanting is a standard noise free HTPC that does 1080P I'd recommend this E350 kit as it has but a single tiny fan on the CPU and is quiet as a churchmouse, and is quite easy to customize to what you want it to do. I'd put a 2GB or 4GB stick along with a 1TB HDD and then its up to you whether you want BD or DVD.
Having built several of these systems I can tell you that it blows a WD Live away, as long as you use fast memory (I recommend the 1333 over the 1066) you can play quite a few games on it, I've personally run L4D, Portal 1 & 2 and Torchlight 1 & 2 on one, and if you want even more power and the ability to play the latest games frankly it isn't hard to slap a Zalman silent on an Athlon or Phenom X4, you simply can't use the mini VCR case due to the size of the heatsink. I've found most of my customers don't really care about the mini VCR case when they see they can have something like this that looks quite stylish sitting next to the TV table, but again if you want to do heavy gaming one will have to put up with a fan or spend more on silent coolers, its all a trade off.
But at the end of the day you really need to look at how long the unit will last, I have a couple of customers that have first gen Athlon X2s I built HTPCs around and they are still happy more than 6 years later, all I did was up the storage when they started running low and as drive prices dropped. and unlike the consoles or smart TVs they can still surf the latest websites, use the latest software, watch flash no problem, its really not hard to build a quiet HTPC with just a little thought beforehand.
While I agree to a point as somebody who has raised two kids there are certain things you don't want a little kid exposed to, hell as an adult I wish I could have some brain bleach to remove some of the things I have seen (two girls anyone?) but more to the point the problem here is NOT the porn, its the fact that these companies are just taking trade ins and throwing them in a box and calling them refurbs when they are not.
I sell plenty of refurbs in the shop and I would never EVER even think about putting out a system that hadn't been wiped and reloaded, its just a sign of piss poor store policy to allow such a thing to even happen. If its a system with a restore partition I will zero out the user partition before restoring and if not I'm zeroing out the entire drive, but there really is no excuse to leaving shit on a refurb. What if it had been infected with malware? I haven't messed with hand helds in years so I don't know if they make a cable to plug into a PC or not but I have seen plenty of devices, both "refurb" and even those listed as "new" that customers have picked up to find they are full of malware and other nasties. I once had to clean all the computers in a church because one of the volunteers picked up a "new" backup drive at Worst Buy and not only was it full of porn but it was also infected by a clickjacker bug that spread like wildfire through their network and they were getting porn popups by the hundreds.
So there really is no excuse, whether the device is supposed to be for a 5 year old or a 50 year old it should have been restored to factory state before being sold, and I really can't blame a parent for being upset about finding porn on a little kid's Xmas present. Remember thanks to the Internet there is no telling what kind of porn was on the thing,and while I wouldn't be thrilled that somebody left straight porn for my 5 year old to find that is a hell of a lot different than something like two girls or beast porn or any of the other sick shit you find on the net.
Well considering the how to write a Linux virus in 5 easy steps article uses Python and when I search for "Python malware" I get over 600,000 hits? There is probably plenty of Python malware already out there, it just doesn't get as much press as a Windows bug as it has a smaller target. But as long as there is the potential to make money on infected machines I'm sure that somebody will be targeting just about every combo of language and OS you can think of, no OS is immune to a targeted attack.
Now that said I have to deal with some customers that are...sigh...can you say "click happy" and clueless? So after many hours of trying various combos on test boxes here at the shop I have come up with what I call my "foolproof Windows for fools" that makes the machines as solid as tanks and cuts the living hell out of the risk of malware. basically short of them going "Why yes, please infect my machine" which sadly I have had to deal with at least once, well short of them going the extra mile to be super stupid you'll have a system that short of hardware failure won't be going anywhere. For those that want to know how, recipe is as follows:
1.-First make sure their software is all up to date and Windows is set to automatically download and install patches, otherwise they are likely to just ignore the patches and leave the machine vulnerable.
2.- Get a low rights mode browser with ABP, any Chromium based will do but I use Comodo Dragon as it has privalert which will block all the tracking crap and you can choose to use Comodo Secure DNS in the browser only, this helps to block a LOT of infected websites from loading in the first place.
3.- For an AV I recommend either Avast Free or Comodo IS, both have their pluses. Avast AV is a little more "chatty" about what its doing and I found some folks really like that, Comodo IS has built in sandboxing and is easy to configure for the actual user, so its really up to you as both are quite good at stopping malware.
4.- Install FileHippo Update Checker and have it set to run at startup, it only uses a couple hundred KB of memory and will tell them when their third party software is out of date as well as provide links to the software, this keeps them from downloading "flash updates" and other dubious software updates. if the Hippo doesn't say it needs updating then it don't need updating.
5.-Finally you need to have a hidden backup and restore partition, just in case they ever manage to figure a way to get infected or if a family member comes over and trashes things. I am testing Paragon Drive backup for this roll but since I haven't finished testing I'd have to go with Comodo Time Machine but be aware its no longer supported and I don't think its been tested with Windows 8. That said the nice thing here is you can lock a snapshot with everything set up and all the third party software loaded so you have your own "OEM restore partition" without the trialware crap and it can also create snapshots on a schedule and be accessed if the machine can't even boot to desktop by just pushing the Home key. this way if they manage to somehow seriously screw up the OS a single push of the Home key and 20 minutes later they are back up and running.
With these 5 little steps that takes less than an hour all told you will have a machine you can let the most clueless users get a hold of and not have to worry about them borking the system I have several "click happy" customers that have been on this system for over 2 years now and not a single bug, runs just as good as when I handed it to them. In fact I have only had to help one that has been on this system, she forgot to log off and her 16 year old niece got on after she left and did God knows what to the system so it wouldn't boot to desktop. 15 minu
If you like the XBMC UI and want to build an HTPC dirt cheap you really should check out OpenELEC as its built around the XBMC UI and has pre-builds for all the major designs, Atom/ION, AMD Fusion, standard Intel or AMD, etc and even comes with PVR software baked in.
That said I looked into smart TVs before going HTPC with my family and the problem is it is proprietary city, everybody is making their own UIs and nothing is standardized and they all frankly suck. its more about trying to lock you into their ecosystem than it is making a truly great UI and it shows, slow loads, clunky UIs, problems with compatibility with this code or that website, its just a giant PITA.
I built an AMD Bobcat based HTPC for mom and an Athlon X2 based for dad (because he wanted to be able to access his shop cams and so needed a little beefier CPU) and its like night and day compared to the smart TVs. They can run all their programs (I went win 7 HP with XBMC but Win 8 actually works good in this regard as metro is practically a 10 foot UI already), everything is snappy, I slapped in a 1TB HDD and ripped all their CDs and DVDs so if mom wants to watch her horror movies or dad his action its just a push of the button, they can chat, surf, its just so much nicer than the clunky slow smart TVs it wasn't really any comparison.
My only advice would be if you want small and low power get the Bobcat, I ended up having to use a nice black mini-tower instead of a VCR style on dad to fit a silent heatsink, unlike the Bobcat the Athlons do generate some heat and all the mini CPU coolers i found either ran hot or sounded like an F15 taking off. That said I have paired a cheap Athlon or Phenom II X4 with an HD4850 ($30-$40 at Geeks) for several customers that wanted to game and they are quite happy, playing Batman:AC and Saints Row 3 and thanks to all the Steam sales its a lot cheaper than the consoles to build a collection and of course no discs to mess with or lose either.
This is why guys like me that build HTPCs aren't worried about "smart TVs"...because they suck. They aren't updated very often (if at all) and use seriously weak chips anyway so what you end up with is a really poor experience.
My advice would be to look at a DIY kit for an HTPC. If you want high def and low power you should look at an AMD Bobcat, if you don't care about HD you can get an Intel Atom (yes I know about ION but they aren't common or easy to come by anymore and its dead end tech since Nvidia left the chipset biz) and if you want to game or be able to transcode an Athlon or even a Phenom X6 if you can find it on sale would be good.
The nice thing about an HTPC is that you can have the latest browser, flash is no problem, it'll easily take wireless remotes (The Lenovo mini-keyboard with trackball is the one I recommend if you want a small and light remote, easily fits in one hand), Steam had big picture mode which is great for an HTPC, hell its one of the few places Windows 8 makes sense as that fugly metro makes a great 10 foot UI as the tiles are easy to hit. For those that don't want to spend the whole $40 for Win 8 there is OpenELEC which is free, has the XBMC front end, even comes with PVR software baked in and is pre-compiled for various chips so you simply pick the one you've got and away you go.
Once you try an HTPC you'll see how truly limited these "Smart TVs" are and will not want to go back. With the HTPC you can do everything a normal PC can, plus use it as a media tank, with all your movies and music loaded and ready to go, it can play games like a console, and you don't have to use some limited browser that most likely won't be getting updates and is slow to begin with. With OpenELEC you can build one for less than $150, Win 8 less than $200, and frankly the things will just last and last. The whole "Smart TV" is a nice novelty but use it any length of time and as you pointed out the limitations start showing pretty quickly, same with using the consoles to surf.
Why would a Catholic have any problem with someone having their tubes tied? its not aborting a child, its simply keeping the woman from getting pregnant in the first place.
Of course since we are talking about a religion where a bishop in Africa told his followers that the condoms being handed out were infected with aids as a way to wipe out black people? Frankly it wouldn't surprise me if there is some bullshit edict. if we listened to every nutball religion out there frankly we'd still be in the dark ages, time to grow the fuck up and stop making plans based on whether it will offend a sky bully or not.
No I figured it was yet another country getting what they paid for while we get fucked by the corps and end up on the short bus to the info superhighway.
Despite what Wolfram & Hart...err I mean Goldman Sachs says we have actually paid over 200 billion in the form of massive tax breaks and other incentives to get nationwide fiber over a decade ago, what did we get? A low res Goatse from the ISPs who gave their CEOs bonuses with the money.
Scream socialism all you want but the ONLY WAY we are gonna get nationwide fiber is to nationalize the system, have the states lay it just like the roads, and then lease the lines to the companies who will have to compete for customers. because we are already falling behind the rest of the planet, hell Romania is kicking our ass when it comes to bandwidth, and we have already seen that rather than lay lines the corps will just put ever nastier caps while pocketing the profits. You can't have a free market when most people are stuck with a duopoly at best, most with only a monopoly, so we really have no choice but to nationalize the system.
After all if 200 billion in tax breaks and other incentives couldn't get the ISPs to lay down shit what makes anybody think they will just because their customers want netflix? They know they have you by the balls, so it'll be ever nastier caps and ever worse service while the rest of the world passes us by.